She was an Olympian—now Yvette Kong drives social change through education and arts

Qualifying for the Games seemed within reach—until she missed the cut for London 2012 by just 0.1 seconds. “That time felt like [breaking point] for me. I thought I had to quit. I told my team that I would quit the swimming team and just enjoy a ‘normal’ college life,” she says. “But it didn’t take me long to realise I was just running away.” She realised she had to take care of her mental health, a topic often overlooked in Hong Kong, and seek professional support. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kong realised she had become overly focused on results, worrying more about outcomes than enjoying the process. “When I first started swimming, it was just for the joy of it. I love being in the water. I love competing. I needed to find and reignite that passion again.”

Reinvigorated, she got a place at the University of Edinburgh to do a master’s in performance psychology—“basically studying how to bring out the best human potential, especially in high-stake performers”—and then earned a spot to compete in the 100m and 200m breaststroke events, as well as the 4x10m medley relay,
at the 2016 Olympics. “When I arrived at the Olympic Village, it was both very surreal and grounding. It was the accumulation of years of training, but also the beginning of deep questioning of what’s next,” she says.

Read more: The journey of breaking gender stereotypes: the first Japanese woman to win gold at the Math Olympiad

After the Olympics, she retired from competitive swimming. Rather than focusing on training for the next Games, she wanted to spend her twenties building something broader—a social innovation that could benefit society.

Kong got busy. She joined Mind Hong Kong, a mental health advocacy charity, as a founding board member. To sharpen her business skills, she worked at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company and Estée Lauder. In 2021, she enrolled in a dual master’s programme offered by Tsinghua University and MIT. As she completed most
of her MBA coursework at the Chinese institute in her first year, she took art and design classes for her master’s of science at MIT to explore her creative side. She also founded a fashion tech student group, Made in MIT, and staged a runway show.

Her professors took notice of her unusual mix: Olympic athlete, mental health advocate in the non- profit sector and corporate strategist. They wanted to combine what she had learnt into a new course on social innovation, particularly in the age of rapid technological development. “The barrier to creating a new venture or content is not there any more; it’s so easy to create. But how do we create something meaningful?” she asks.

Her answer is “transversal design”—a transdisciplinary approach that blends art and social innovation to create impactful change, which she now teaches at MIT after graduating in 2023. The core elements Kong teaches focus on looking within oneself to discover purpose, considering different perspectives with empathy, and imagining limitless yet practical solutions to social issues. These encourage and empower students to take the initiative in starting an actionable and inventive social innovation project grounded in their core beliefs, passions and experiences. The projects have included technology for mattresses inspired by a late family member with Parkinson’s disease who suffered from bedsores; and animal shelters born from a passion for rescuing strays.

Her teaching led to her creating Transversal Lab, also known as T.Lab, a social venture that supports Hong Kong’s creative economy by backing artists who make socially impactful work. Her own debut art project, The JadeWalkers, showcased at this year’s Venice Biennale, blended stilt-walking, music and dance with cultural symbols—from fencing masks honouring Hong Kong’s Olympic golds to traditional bamboo theatre, illustrating the city’s creative potential.

Read more: Meet the man behind the Labubu madness: Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung

“The question is: other than being a financial hub, can Hong Kong also become a creative powerhouse?” asks Kong, who created the performance with artists Laura Anderson Barbata and Tsai-Chun Huang. “Innovation happens in the interaction of things, and there is no greater place than Hong Kong to showcase a remix of different things. Hong Kong is east and west, hyper- modernity and jungle, doers and dreamers.”

This year, Kong launched Arelyx, an education venture set up to equip children with the tools needed to thrive in the AI age. By coaching teachers and working directly with students, the programme helps the next generation develop qualities that machines cannot replicate—communication, influence and collaboration— and build psychological resilience.

Nearly a decade after leaving competitive swimming, Kong sees the sport as the “bedrock” of her character. It taught her to lose with grace, win with humility, respect the process and persist through silence, self- doubt and setbacks—qualities that now fuel her work in social innovation.

Read more: Liew speaks on reinventing fintech, balancing innovation with trust and the power of AI

“Any sort of venture has high uncertainty. How do we have high certainty internally in this world of uncertainty? That requires conviction and commitment,” she says. Those who follow through on such convictions “are the visionaries who see things that others might not be able to see yet”, adding that the process of proving or making their visions a reality can be lonely.

“I always follow my ‘why’,” the 32-year-old says. This approach is how she reignited her passion for swimming back then, and it is something she teaches in her course at MIT. “I look into my heart to find out what is meaningful to me, why I’m doing it and the ripple effects of my choices.

“Follow the questions that light you up and not the answers that please others. We don’t have to have only one path. There is no right or wrong path—only your path.”

Now, meet more Gen.T Leaders of Tomorrow 2025 from the Education sector. 

NOW READ

How former Miss Hong Kong Grace Chan went from TV star to content queen

How high-school dropout Vivian Siu became the first female F4 driver to finish Macau Grand Prix

From mountains to millions: Komsan Lee of Flash Express didn’t build Thailand’s first unicorn in a flash